is marked 1766. Its humour it malicious from the first line, as the "Dr. Tamponet" whose name is put to it was really an orthodox champion of the Sorbonne. It is in this short diatribe that I have chiefly made the modifications of which I have spoken. It was Voltaire's aim to show that the coarseness of many passages of the Old Testament is quite as inconsistent with inspiration as its colossal inaccuracy and its childlike superstition. An English translation, similarly modified, of the Questions of Zapata was made by an anonymous lady, and published by Hetherington, in 1840. In the present translation some of the paragraphs are omitted, and the numbering is therefore altered.
The Epistle to the Romans, another specimen of Voltaire's most deadly polemic, is a just and masterly indictment of the papal system. It was issued in 1768, and very promptly put on the Index by the outraged Vatican. But it penetrated educated Italy, and had no small share in the enlightenment which has ended in the emancipation of the country. The exquisite imitations of sermons which follow contain some of Voltaire's most insidious and delicate irony. The Sermon of the Fifty was written and published in 1762.
The volume closes with the famous poem which Voltaire wrote, in the year 1755, when he heard that an earthquake had destroyed between 30,000 and 40,000 people in Portugal. It was one of the chief festivals of the Catholic year, the Feast of All Saints (November 1), and the crowded churches were in the very act of worship, when the ground shook. In a few minutes 16,000 men, women, and children
